City, Culture and Society xxx (xxxx) xxx Please cite this article as: Fernando León Tamayo Arboleda, Libardo José Ariza, City, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2022.100486 1877-9166/© 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Urban surveillance and crime governance in Bogot´ a Fernando Le´ on Tamayo Arboleda a, * , Libardo Jos´e Ariza b a Sociology and Criminal Law Professor of the Universidad Aut´ onoma Latinoamericana in Medellín, Colombia, He Conducts Research on Legal Geography, Sociology, Sociology of Law, Criminology, Criminal Law and Prison Studies. Universidad Aut´ onoma Latinoamericana, Kra 55 # 49-51, Medellín, 050012, Colombia b Sociology Professor of the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogot´ a, Colombia. He Conducts Research on Sociology, Sociology of Law, Criminology, and Prison Studies. Universidad de Los Andes, Kra 1 # 18A - 12, Bogot´ a, 111711, Colombia A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Surveillance Public space Colombia Crime governance Urban governance ABSTRACT This paper analyses how recent changes on crime governance strategies in Bogot´a have carried a modification on how surveillance is put into practice in the city. We argue that the reduction of the violence linked to the armed conflict along with the implementation of transnational forms of governing security led surveillance practices to be focused on public spaces instead of individuals. For public spaces to be surveilled, a classification between secure and insecure spaces has been created, which rests upon an esthetic ideal of how those spaces (should) look like. This shift from biographical surveillance to geographical surveillance implies that individuals stop being the main target of classification and control. In their stead, public space is the main object of surveillance. Yet, the fact that individuals are not the core of this governance technology does not mean that they do not experience the consequences of it. The meanings that are arranged around the esthetics of public spaces indorse practices of self-surveillance in which citizens should watch over the city, and protect themselves from crime. 1. Introduction Surveillance is a recent field of study. The first contributions to the subject started to appear only in the 1970s (Rule, 1973), and Foucault’s (2014) work was the final push to make surveillance a specific topic of analysis (Lyon, 1994, p. 6). However, despite the increasing reflection on the matter in the Global North, Latin American literature is limited. 1 The analyses by Arteaga (2015; 2017) present some of the most relevant differences existing between the forms of surveillance in Latin America and those—much more analyzed—in the Global North countries. As Arteaga (2015) shows, dictatorships, internal armed conflicts, and gang violence mainly related to drug trafficking, produce specific sur- veillance practices in the region, which are still to be explored. Furthermore, the interaction of different forms of contemporary sur- veillance extended worldwide with the Latin American discourses, practices, techniques, and contexts has shaped a particular governance technology with an enormous impact on the daily life of the region’s inhabitants. This paper suggests that the concern to reduce crime rates in Colombia has shaped a specific form of surveillance in its most popu- lated city —Bogot´ a, which host around ten million people— that is structured on certain theatricalization of public spaces. Thinking the city as a stage play, the public spaces are conceived as places where security must be staged. In doing so, state agencies produce a particular idea of what public spaces should look like. Secure spaces are clean, peaceful, and strongly surveilled; while insecure spaces are filthy, hostile, pre- carious, and barely controlled. Those meanings about security and insecurity convey an effort to maintain a certain visual esthetic throughout the city and control citizens’ behavior within public spaces. Although the concern to establish strict controls of public space is common to the Global North countries (Crawford, 2009; Liempt & Aalst, 2012; Mitchell, 2014; Valverde, 2005), and even if the modes of sur- veillance deployed to ensure them are also similar (Arteaga, 2012), the conditions of violence in Colombia, the customary state fragility, and how different interventions are justified and legitimized have allowed a previously undetected crime-control technology to constitute largely invasive, but almost imperceptible, forms of daily surveillance in the region. These modes of surveillance were focused on turning public space into a set of meanings intended to discipline individuals’ daily actions. Our paper addresses public space as a key part of a wider political technology of governance (Duarte and Firmino 2016). As it has been * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: fernando.tamayoar@unaula.edu.co, fernandoleontamayo@hotmail.com (F.L. Tamayo Arboleda), lj.ariza20@uniandes.edu.co (L.J. Ariza). 1 The only authors who address the subject directly are Salas Torres (2015), Mour˜ao Kanashiro (2008), Jasso L´ opez (2019), Firmino and Trevisan (2012), and Arteaga (2012; 2015; 2017). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect City, Culture and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ccs https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2022.100486 Received 5 November 2020; Received in revised form 18 May 2022; Accepted 21 September 2022